Ekong stood before the big door.

His hand closed around the cold doorknob, his eyes level with the keyhole, which streamed yellow, incandescent light into his dark iris. His hand remained there for a long while, heart banging against his ribs. He could hear his father thrashing behind the door, his boots making squeaky noises against the floor of his room. What a coward, Ekong thought of himself. Someone was killing his father and he could not even turn the doorknob.

Ekong summoned all his courage and tried to open the door. But a voice stopped him. It was a little girl's voice, shaky and afraid. Don't do it, Ekong, the voice whimpered. Don't do it. And Ekong hated that voice: how small and like him it sounded. But he heeded it, as he always did, withdrawing his hand from the doorknob and stepping back.

Backwards and backwards Ekong stepped down the dark, infinite hallway until he could no longer see the tiny light from the distant keyhole. There in the enveloping dark he sat, hands wrapped around his knees, cowering, crying, but safe.

♡

Ekong's eyes contracted to the light.

The dream faded quickly from his memory, draining away to the place dreams go when the waking mind banishes them. He was lying on a white bed inside a cramped little room. The room was white as well, pristine. There was no sofa, only a diner by the corner with two white chairs and a white table. Black and naked under the sheets, only Ekong seemed out of place.

He frowned, his face dappled by sunlight streaming in through a single netted window. He had just spotted the alarm box sitting atop a cylindrical white stand beside the bed. He smashed his palm against the springy button jutting out the top of the box, silencing its blare.

Ekong sat up and rubbed at his eyes, which was crusted with eye gunk and heavy with half-attended sleep. He threw off the sheets and walked over to the diner where he gathered the books that had kept him awake half through last night, arranging them into a neat pile before sliding it to a corner of the table, as if the very sight of Schrödinger's Cat: An Analysis would make his pounding headache much, much worse.

He switched on the TV.

Third human landing on Mars, a reporter was saying on the television as he headed into the kitchen and fixed himself some noodles and eggs. He ate in the diner beside the window, watching Lagos come alive with dawn, amused by the sugar mommies and alhajis hurrying towards their tardy Ubers, kaftans billowing and geles askew.

His fate rested with someone else now, Ekong thought, tucking into his breakfast. He had done his part; years and years of study. Particle physics, relativity, quantum mechanics, not to mention the obsessive research on the phenomena of Quantum Entanglement and metaphysics. He had suffered countless sleepless nights, loneliness, subtle bullying, abusive lecturers and the occasional fits of screaming into his pillow back in the dormitories of Ahmadu Bello.

Ekong had done his part. Now the rest was out of his hands.

Not getting this job would mean that he was finished, his entire savings already emptied into registrations. But Ekong remained positive. In inertia lay true failure.

Breakfast done, Ekong wedged himself between the walls of his narrow bathroom for a close shave and a warm, steamy shower. How far he'd come, he thought, wrapping himself in a white towel. Who could have imagined that a gambler's son from the trenches of Okene would one day find himself in a hotel in the middle of Lagos, waiting on a call from one of the leading Research and Development companies in Africa.

The telephone rang.

Ekong flew across the room, nearly slipping on the smooth linoleum. “Hello?” he said, pulling the handset to his ear. “Yes, this is he.”

Ekong placed his other hand delicately under the handset, as if the call were an egg he was afraid to drop. “Yes I applied and wrote the examination for the post at Titan Corp.”

The man on the other side of the phone gave him a general idea of his new job description and insisted, rather firmly, that Ekong must not write them down. “Extreme discretion, Mr. Ekong, is what we value most in our staff,” the man said. “You will be at Mobolaji Train Station no later than 7:09 am WAT, Platform 12. There you will board the 7:10 train to Nguru Station and find your way to the coordinates 13°11’N 10°51’E. Are we together, Mr. Ekong?”

"13°11’N 10°51’E,” Ekong repeated. “We're together, sir.”

“Excellent. The account you provided should by now have been credited with a sum of six hundred and sixty million Naira—your first payday. Please confirm.”

Ekong's phone chimed on the dining table.

He craned his neck towards it and saw an alert from his bank. “Confirmed, sir,” he said. “But if you don't mind my asking, what exactly will I be observing?”

“That question makes us doubt that you're the right man for this appointment, Mr. Ekong.”

Ekong's heart sank. "My apologies, sir,” he said sheepishly. “I fully understand, sir.”

"The equation itself is of paramount importance. All other observations are peripheral.”

“I understand, sir. Please, how long do I have before I have to report, sir?”

“As long as the subject allows.”

“I’m sorry, sir, allows?”

“Precisely. And please note, Mr. Ekong, that failure to obtain the equation will result in the immediate termination of your appointment, and that effective immediately you are to cease all means of communication that could hazard a cyber footprint.”

"I won't let you down, sir. In fact Titan Corp. has always been my—”

“You will find every tool and facility necessary to your work readily available at Watch Tower. Good luck, Mr. Ekong.”

The line disconnected before he could thank the man.

Ekong hung the handset back on the telephone.

Then he screamed for the next quarter hour.

♡

Rain. Rain falling in deep streets. Dark clouds rolling over a city of tall buildings and restless souls.

Lagos was a city for the insane. The hollering of ten thousand people drowned out the rumble of thunder. Ekong made his way towards his platform, shouldering through working class men and women, foul-mouthed agberos, pickpockets and ragged almajirin with dead eyes shoving worthless goods in his face. Ekong muscled through them all, his heart skipping as the numbers on his watch sped ever closer to 7:09.

He came to Platform 12 at last, soaked and breathing like a beat dog. Two huge, brawny men in black suits guarded it and Ekong had to place his thumb on a biometric device before they let him wait there for his train.

Ekong's mind whirled. Was he really here? Was this really happening? Has success truly found him? A few people on Platform 11 were even peeking at him between the two guards, no doubt thinking him a celebrity or some big shot politician.

The train arrived.

Ekong got on and had a whole compartment to himself. Sitting by the window, he watched the two guards leaving the platform until he lost them in the Brownian flow of the crowd. They must be Titan, he thought, searching for the two towering figures. But by the time Ekong found them again, watching him through dark glasses like mortared golems frozen in that river of social chaos, the train was already leaving the station, emerging through a blind tunnel into a grey storm beaten city where the few lights Ekong saw came from the far side of town.

Something about the road ahead worried him as he stared into the raging storm. He felt like something was closing in around him, a hand he could not quite see.

A hand he could not quite see! he tested, and snorted at the thought. He was just new to success was all it was. He opened his briefcase and took out his earpods and his Android phone. It was surreal, the fact that he could afford not one but ten water-resistant phones if he wanted. Ekong chuckled. His gamble was paying off. He took out one last thing. 

It was an itinochi. A handwoven, red and purple striped cloth his little sister had made and gifted to him the day he left Okene for greener pastures. It was his most prized possession, bar his mind, another gift his mother had always told him would take him places. “But there is no blessing in success if you will not use it to help your own people,” his mother had told him that day as the bus rolled out of the park, separating his soft hands from her calloused ones. “Remember your sister, Ekong. I might not have long!”

That had been over nine years ago. In that time his mother had died of a longstanding typhoid and the unbearable grief had led him to sever all ties with home, including his sister Edet with whom Ekong shared the deepest of all trauma: that of an angry, alcoholic father.

All that remained of Ekong's past now were merely symbolic: the itinochi, the recurring dream, the guilt he numbed with study and food. It was the best he could hope for, this distancing and numbness, for the truth lay recessed somewhere deep and dark, in a place he rarely opened except in his interminable dreams.

Presently, Ekong spread his sister's itinochi over himself as he lay down on the leather seat. Lightning streaked the sky outside and its henchman rumbled and trundled away—and him from it—but pierced all the same through the music on his earpods and his peace.

He ignored the chaos and slept.

♡

And as he slept he dreamed.

And in his dreams, where he was at best only a passenger, was Ekong forced to examine his memories for the umpteenth time, there within that deep and dark place. A place made up of a keyhole and a stream of yellow light and a damning voice. His sister's voice.

Don't do it, Edet whispered as she sat legs folded and tiny, her back against the big door as if to say, No, I won't let you. And when Ekong saw her big brown eyes looking up into his he had unhandled the doorknob, realising that her words were only an echo of a desire he had long fostered within his own heart. A desire to end the brutal beatings. To stop the extortion of his mother. To keep her hard-earned money from being gambled away while they starved. A desire to become, for all the world, a murderer.

Ekong stepped back. 

Backwards and backwards he went until he found himself slumped against the wall opposite Edet. And in the incandescence of his emotions Ekong froze his heart into stone, listening to his father choke, his little sister’s sobs, waiting for the angel of death to fly back out the window whence it came.

Ekong woke up, the train speeding through grey mist and increasingly wild terrain.

This time the dream did not fade away as it always had. For this dream was true to life. And in life he had shown no remorse. No hugging of his knees. No tears, not even in his father's death rattle. And yet what child could carry such a thing in their conscience as make men turn inside out with shame? What child would not seek to pass on such an unbearable weight? Ekong had gone on to absolve himself of any blame, passing onto Edet, whose whisper had validated his desires, the weight of his crushing guilt. He'd passed it on to her through the slow decay of time; the poison of his silences; the cruelty of his estrangement, so that all the man could do now, like the little boy in his false dreams, was to sit with his hands wrapped around his knees, crying, his body racked by sobs that came from nowhere and everywhere, an overpressured dam threatening to burst.

Ekong wept for the dead. For his mother and even his father. He wept for innocence. For Edet who both the living and the dead had forsaken to the whims of fate. He picked up his phone and dialled his mother's old number, hoping that it would have passed to Edet—Edet, whose devotion to him never wavered in spite of his coldness towards her—but just before his call could connect Ekong frantically thumbed the red button, ending it. Extreme discretion, the man's voice boomed in his head.

Frustrated but feeling much lighter, Ekong drew his sister's itinochi tightly over himself, and before long a deep sleep took him. Just beyond the reach of guilt.

♡

A desert. The coordinates had brought him to a desert.

Ekong dropped his briefcase and scanned the featureless horizon, hands in the small of his back and sweltering. The Yusufari desert was endless tan sands punctuated by the odd, lone tree. The sun hung blurry white in the center of a clear blue sky. An unforgiving ball of heat. Ekong removed his suit jacket and waistcoat and folded them neatly into his briefcase. He risked some water from his bottle to cool his head and loosened his black tie which burnt his neck like a hangman’s noose.

Then he walked.

His feet were burning inside his shoes before he fell upon that staggering vision. It was a wall ten stories tall. It ran smoothly North and South for at least half a mile before bending around a corner at both ends, stretching westwards. Looking at it, it seemed to Ekong as if someone had dropped a colossal black box right in the middle of nowhere. How could anyone have built this incognito? he wondered. And if his geodetic surveying skills hadn't failed him then that structure was exactly where he was headed.

Ekong removed his sunglasses, keeping his eyes peeled on that strange wall. The sun was low. A single bloodshot eye hovering just over the distant wall colouring the world that same hue of red that gave away the strangeness of dreams. Ekong thought there was something off about the sun's shape. One moment it looked perfectly spherical but look long enough and it became more oblong. And looking a bit longer, Ekong thought that it was rather more oval than oblong. But then it was taking a more lateral shape now, something quadrilateral as Ekong saw it. A rhombus! It was a rhombus!

Then it began. A flurry of solar shapes. Now a hexagon and now an enneagram, a squircle, a triquetra, each shape followed in quick succession by the next as the red ball of plasma grew ever smaller and closer to Ekong's eyes, his initial amusement waning with every inch. The sun bent and stretched and folded into itself, holding his attention in a vice grip. Suddenly, Ekong felt cold. He felt untethered from the world. Cutoff from the heat of the dunes. And when his eyes found the unperturbed center of the sun, fear formed an insuperable lump in his throat. Dark as vantablack, the center was a little keyhole that pulled light into itself, devouring the red ball even as it blitzed through every shape he knew and did not know until it settled acutely into a little keyhole that hung right in front of Ekong's nose, impossibly cold. Unbearably immense.

Eyes wide open, Ekong kept the thing at bay. He was looking into the empty heart of an abyss. He was staring into the deep dark place thrown wide open, the suction deafening as his nails bit deep into his palms without stimulus, desperate to be woken up.

A second.

Three seconds.

Ten seconds.

Ekong ripped his eyes away, closing it shut.

The thing swallowed him whole.

♡

Like waking into a dream.

Ekong opened his eyes standing inside the enclosure. He was at its very center, its dark walls dwarfing him like barely discernible cliff faces. Above him, he found that the thing was still there, brilliant but illuminating nothing as it hovered innocently in the shape of an oily iridescent sphere, not twenty meters above him but apparently stable.

As if suddenly remembering recent events, Ekong staggered back and tripped over his own legs, the crack of bone as he hit the sands opening his eyes and mind to the gruesome reality of things.

He was lying in a graveyard.

The silvery moon creeping over the north wall revealed dozens of dead bodies in various stages of decay, all forming a neat halo around the hovering prismatic ball, their bodies stretched in a manner so geometrical that one would think they'd been spaghettified by a—

“Wormhole,” Ekong said. His voice was quiet, his attention turning to the sphere as the epiphany temporarily banished any concerns about his morbid sense of place. “It's a fucking wormhole!”

Ekong stood and walked in circles around the sphere, whooping and jumping and shouting exultant profanities as he observed the unmoving, unprecedented mass. He did this for a long while until the ground began to shake under his feet. A structure was rising from the ground and Ekong quickly steadied himself on all fours. Metal joints creaked and groaned as some underground contraption raised a concave glass house from the bowels of the earth, the single word TITAN emblazoned in azure neon on the wind resistant curves of the bone-white roof. By the time it was over a turtle-shaped building stood high on great metal legs before him, and he could see through the glass that he would want for nothing.

Ekong dusted himself up and looked for his phone amongst the dead. He found it at the rim of the halo, lodged in the open mouth of an old corpse whose coat pocket had a tag that read Dr. Anuli Jedidiah.

Ekong smiled.

“Hard luck, Doctor,” he said as he removed his phone from between her gumless teeth. Then he began to detail his observations, his phone switched to voice recording as he headed towards Watch Tower which stood with its cyclopean window facing that hovering all-color mass as if daring it to divulge all of its secrets.

Behind him, an itinochi rolled away with the wind.

♡

The table clock was ticking the wrong way.

Ekong watched it solemnly through the reading glasses settled on the ridge of his nose. His back was reclined on a rotatable chair, his fingers locked over his stomach like a drunk. Eyelids heavy, he felt half-asleep. His desk was covered with papers, some riddled with tentative variations of the Schrödinger equation, while others sought to pin down the Lorentz transformations of a dizzyingly unstable hypersphere, whose time coordinate seemed to consistently move forward in one iteration then backwards in the next.

Backwards and backwards the three clock hands went, mocking him and his unfathomable equations.

Beyond the circular window of Watch Tower the thing Ekong had thought to be a wormhole—this thing which seemed to have a mind and yet made no sense—was shifting through ten faces per second, its mutable, liquid center now a man and now a woman, each face distinguishable from the next only by the difference of switching a single strand in a double helix.

Backwards and backwards the clock hands went.

A blind tan moth had perched itself on the curve of Ekong's knee and was now making its gentle way up his comatose-like body. It stopped over his dense beard, sucking on the thick blood that trickled steadily from Ekong's nose. 

Ekong let out a slow, long exhale.

The moth panicked, beating its delicate limbs away towards the roaring mass, whose center had devolved upon the stable visage of a sad-faced woman, herself growing closer and more detailed as the mass passed through the glass barrier of the window like there was nothing there, swallowing the moth and everything in its path.

For Ekong, the world was reduced to the noise of suction and the spin of the clock hands, which slowly faded from the face of the clock as they spun towards relativistic speeds, until Ekong lost them entirely beyond space, reason and time.

There was no last gasp of his sister's name. No redemption. No pain. Ekong's eyelids simply fell closed.

♡

Dr. Anuli Jedidiah—under the usual cloud of dejection—was in the mini diner, scrolling through Facebook pictures of an estranged sister when the telephone rang.

She dashed over to it, nearly slipping on the smooth linoleum and picked up the call. “Yes, this is she,” she said to the man on the phone, who gave her a general idea of her new job description.

“Extreme discretion, Dr. Jedidiah, is what we value most in our staff,” he said.

♡

February 21, 2026